Microsoft Research staff members have built an impressive new query-processing engine for performing big data analytics. Called Trill — a reference to “a trillion events per day” — the engine enables programmers to very quickly get results from queries on large piles of data.

Microsoft has revealed that it’s open-sourcing Worldwide Telescope (WWT), a computer program launched back in 2008 that displays the heavens using images from the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as Earth-based lenses.

With the high volume of new products and flashy prototypes vying for attention at the 2013 CES, very few have shown the kind of innovation needed to bring humanity one step closer to creating the ultimate consumer electronic device: a holodeck.